“I guess when you'd lived as long, and pondered as much, as Old Tom had...a game of hopscotch could be more profound than village politics or gossip.”

“...what could be more vexing than to be feted on his birthday when he wants nothing so much as to retreat in solitude to ponder the approach of his own mortality?”

“At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.”

“Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.”

“He had to live out the entirety of his life as Dalton Prestwick. It was really a worse fate than anything Tom could inflict on him.”

“I believe hurling is the best of us, one of the greatest and most beautiful expressions of what we can be. For me that is the perspective that death and loss cast on the game. If you could live again you would hurl more, because that is living. You'd pay less attention to the rows and the mortgage and the car and all the daily drudge. Hurling is our song and our verse, and when I walk in the graveyard in Cloyne and look at the familiar names on the headstones I know that their ownders would want us to hurl with more joy and more exuberance and more (as Frank Murphy used to tell us) abandon than before, because life is shorter than the second half of a tournament game that starts at dusk.”